Secretary of State John Kerry said in China Monday that the recent wave of record-high temperatures shows that the planet is sending a shrill warning that humans have to act quickly to reverse the effects of climate change.
“[T]he warning bells are just going crazy. They’re screaming at us,” Kerry said in Beijing in a climate meeting with Chinese State Councilor Yang Jiechi.
Kerry, a fierce advocate of the Paris climate deal reached last December and signed in April, warned that agreement wasn’t enough to hold the global temperature increase as low as the 2 degrees Centigrade that he wanted, and said more has to be done.
“What it does is send a signal to the marketplace all around the world that 195 countries have all agreed, within the capacities of each of those countries, to move in the same direction,” he said.
But in the meantime, he warned, temperatures continue to rise.
“[T]he last decade, is the hottest decade recorded in human history,” he said. “And the decade before that is the second hottest and the decade before that is the third hottest.”
